A recent poll of evangelical Christians’ political views showed that sympathy for the Jewish state is less pervasive among the younger generations than among the older. Mark Tooley argues that the ideas of two pro-Israel Christian thinkers might appeal more to young people than those normally cited by Christian Zionists. He also dispels the common stereotype that the favorable views of evangelical Christians toward Israel stem primarily from the notion that the Jews’ return to Zion is a prerequisite for the messianic era, a notion that fits into a wider theology known as “dispensationalism.”

Most evangelicals believe that God’s promise of the land to the Jews is enduring, but belief in that covenant doesn’t automatically equate to preoccupation with end times. . . .

Here’s where [Reinhold] Niebuhr can be helpful. He was a theological modernist who rejected dispensationalism but . . . appreciated humanity’s fallen nature. Even as a young pastor he embraced the cause of persecuted Jews and their need for a homeland in Palestine. His support for Zionism increased during the Nazi ascendancy in the 1930s, during which he also abandoned pacifism in favor of armed resistance to the fascist powers.

Niebuhr’s Zionism caused friction with many of his liberal friends, but he was unrelenting. In “Our Stake in the State of Israel” (1957), an article in the New Republic, he lamented the West’s dearth of support for Israel, which was the “only sure strategic anchor of the democratic world” in the Middle East. . . . Niebuhr, a Protestant liberal of sorts, backed Zionism as a humanitarian, moral, and pragmatic necessity in defense of a long-persecuted people who were friends of democracy. That the Jews had a deep historic tie to the land, even if he declined to affirm an ongoing biblical promise, only added to his commitment to their cause. . . .

Another option exists for Christians and specifically for evangelicals in search of a sturdy perspective on modern Israel. Gerald McDermott, an ordained Anglican who teaches at Beeson Divinity School, one of evangelicalism’s most distinguished seminaries, has published two recent books and numerous articles on [what he terms] the New Christian Zionism, avoiding end-times dispensationalism but stressing that early church fathers and other Christian thinkers across the centuries, including the Puritans, understood as ongoing the biblical promises of the promised land to the Jews.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.